- Led by Health Innovation Network with Sydenham Garden and Lewisham IAPT.
- Supporting people with chronic joint pain to explore whether their Joint Pain Advice (JPA) approach – an intervention which supports people to self-manage their hip and/or knee and/or back pain – could be adapted to support people in mental health settings.
- The initial scoping and testing for this project took place with the Q Lab March – October 2019.
- The next phase – with funding from the Health Foundation and NHS England/Improvement – will take place January – December 2020.
Why this project
The Joint Pain Advice approach is a model of care to support self-management of hip and/or knee and/or back pain using behavioural change techniques. The approach which has been successfully delivered in physical health settings and can be delivered by a range of practitioners. Evaluation for people who have access to JPA has shown improvements in mental wellbeing. The team wanted to explore partnerships in broader healthcare settings that could deliver JPA.
For their work with the Q Lab, HiN developed a new partnership with Sydenham Garden – a wellbeing centre which uses its gardens and activities to help people in their recovery from mental health problems. The team tested and adapted the JPA programme to include neck pain and adjust language. They trained staff at Sydenham Garden to deliver JPA to their co-workers (people with mental health problems) who use the centre.
Sydenham Garden is the current setting for the Q Lab testing work, and the hypothesis is that the JPA can potentially be adapted for other mental health settings, or with other services where people also experience chronic joint pain. For the HiN team, what is key has been identifying the core components of JPA that are essential for impact, and what aspects of the need be adapted.
The work so far
In the early stages the team focused on reviewing the JPA intervention with mental health service users and staff from Sydenham Gardens to make it suitable to use in a mental health setting. Key staff at Sydenham Gardens then received training and began trialling the intervention with co-workers.
The team will continue their work adapting the Joint Pain Advice model so that it can be delivered successfully in mental health settings. This includes continuing testing the model with Sydenham Gardens and gathering evidence and building on their learning to test in another mental setting, an IAPT service in Lewisham. The team will later develop plans for how the model can be adopted and adapted to other settings in the future.